Google has agreed to delete billions of data records reflecting users’ browsing activities to settle a class-action lawsuit that alleges the search giant tracked them without their knowledge or consent in its Chrome browser.
The class action, filed in 2020, alleged that the company misled users by tracking their Internet browsing activity who thought it remained private when they used “incognito” or “private” mode on web browsers like Chrome.
It emerged in late December 2023 that the company had agreed to settle the lawsuit. The settlement is currently awaiting approval from U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers.
“The settlement provides broad relief regardless of any challenges presented by Google’s limited recordkeeping,” an April 1, 2024, court filing reads.
“Most of the private browsing data in these logs will be deleted in its entirety, including billions of event-level data records reflecting the private browsing activities of class members.”
As part of the data cleansing process, Google is also required to eliminate information that makes private browsing data identifiable by redacting data points such as IP addresses, generalizing user-agent strings, and removing detailed URLs within a specific website (for example, keeping only domain data). level portion of the URL).
Additionally, it was asked to eliminate the so-called X-Client-Data header field, which Google described as a Chrome-Variations header that captures the “installation status of Chrome itself, including active variants, as well as the server side experiments that may affect your installation.”
This header is generated from a random seed value, potentially making it unique enough to identify specific Chrome users.
Other settlement terms require that Google block third-party cookies in Chrome’s incognito mode for five years, a setting the company has already implemented for all users. The tech company separately announced plans to eliminate tracking cookies by default by the end of the year.
Google has since updated the incognito mode wording in January 2024 to clarify that the setting will not change “how data is collected from the websites you visit and the services you use, including Google.”
The lawsuit drew admissions from Google employees who characterized the browser’s incognito mode as a “confusing mess,” “effectively a lie,” and a “problem of professional ethics and basic honesty.”
It also laid bare internal exchanges in which executives argued that incognito mode should not be called “private” because it risked “exacerbating known misconceptions.”
The development comes as Google said it has started automatically blocking senders in bulk in Gmail who don’t meet email sender guidelines in a bid to reduce spam and phishing attacks.
The new requirements make it mandatory for email senders who send more than 5,000 messages per day to Gmail accounts to provide a one-click unsubscribe option and respond to unsubscribe requests within two days.